Somewhere in South
Florida diesel fumes could be smelled in the air while the loud Motor Coach bus
rattled, and Faye said goodbye to her husband. She waved to him unremarkably
even though she was still a little frail and exhausted. Her mind was in disrepair,
but resolved as she rolled her suitcase to the busman to throw into the space
underneath. It was a dark night with no moonlight at all, and the red and blue
lights of police beacons were spinning in the distance away from her own
situation. She climbed into the bus to find her seat, and left him. Finally.

Weeks earlier, her
husband had come home with prostitutes. Faye, malnourished to skin and bones,
weakened, tired, unwashed, and beginning to feel sick dutifully took off her
clothes as the prostitutes denuded with her. The rented women fawned over
her, all together naked on a carpet that had not been vacuumed in ages.
They fussed over her pretty, yet stringy and clumpy hair.

The three women kissed
and coo’d together, panting incessantly while he watched. Two of them
professionally teemed outwardly like wild felines preying for sexual mating.
Faye submitted willingly and survived by kissing back, flicking her tongue
inside the mouths of the painted Cougars who ordered it. Her husband
delighted in the hookers inflicting their wills on her. They restrained
her, fiddled with her clitoris until she screamed, and then forced themselves
onto her face and demanded her to lick them furiously until they faked their
own climaxes for him.

After having sex
with the women, he left her in the house alone. He would spread his
corruption across the rest of the night somewhere. She convinced herself it was
a good night and that she even enjoyed the company. Faye put herself together,
finding some clothes to wear on her broken body, possibly just a t shirt and
jeans that were the only kind that she had that fit her just the way she liked.
She took stock in anything that would comfort her, no matter how small, to
build up just enough strength to log into Second Life.

She heard him come
home hours later before dawn. Drunk. He told her that she was so pretty and
that the other girls loved her, but he loved her more. She went AFK from her
Second Life while he took her to the bedroom and began to have sex with her.
She let him have his way with her because he seemed nicer than earlier that
night, and she flashed back to the image of the strong police officer she had
fell in love with, and then married. His compliments were nothing in the
grand scheme of things, but they were something in that moment nonetheless, and
she had conditioned herself to find value in anything no matter how
insignificant just so she could put up with her growing insanity.

She let herself fall
into this cycle of abuse, and became conditioned to a degree of disheveled
fitness to withstand it. How could she escape it? After all, they shared their
lives. Their home, relatives, finances, worldly resources all were commingled.
And wasn’t all this her fault anyway? She could see and feel herself getting less
attractive. Certainly that’s why he began to bring home the prostitutes. He
still also said often that he loved her.

He passed out next to
her, exhausted and drunk from his disgusting midnight galavants
unable to finish having sex. She laid next to him in the bed weak, and feeling
heavy. The sort of heavy feeling that hurts and comes from a depressed
lifelessness. She thought of anything pleasant about her life, and reminded
herself that he was somehow after all taking care of her. Comforted by her
fabrication, she fell asleep.

She stayed laying in
bed, absent of energy in the morning as he heroically shook off his headache in
front of her, and headed off into the world to serve and protect. She pushed
herself to get up after he left. During the day Faye worked professionally from
their computer at home. Her performance with her work was suffering, though, as
a consequence of barely being able to keep herself together, but she mustered
up the effort over and over again to recover whatever missteps she had taken.
Slow to get tasks done, she concentrated on them fiercely one at a time to
finally squeeze out her assignments. Her ability to multitask had long been
destroyed. Somehow they kept her around, maybe even forgetting she was there to
be let go. She had this at least.

Faye’s husband laid
passed out in front of the television from all of the beer he had drank. He
wasn’t an alcoholic, but a full week of work and erratic sleep coming from
leading a life in the fast lane had caught up with him. She was online in
Second Life while chatting with a girlfriend via Skype, living her alternative
life to pursue both relief from her reality, and her fetish for submission.

The time she spent in
the Second Life world was typically later at night while he was out, or after
he had fallen asleep, perhaps drunk. Sometimes he beat her, and sometimes he
just held her roughly while demanding his points. His mind was so clouded from
everything he was seeing or doing in his own life that he had no judgement that
restrained himself from hurting her. Sometimes she just escaped with the laptop
to the bathroom. She hid everything she did on the computer from him, even
sending her chat logs and other game viewer data to secret file folders that
were not obviously found on their computer. She was fortunately much more
skilled with computers than he was.

Faye joined a group of
women that gravitated toward one Master in Second Life, and met Katrina as one
of her sisters. As Katrina got to know Faye, and chatted with her, she sensed
that things weren’t well. Faye was getting obsessive about her avatar’s
appearance, and she was also terribly eager to please her Second Life Master in
ways that, well, just seemed off. Katrina began to get concerned, maybe
even a bit fearfully.

Besides her friend’s
obvious communication patterns that signaled distress, Katrina was having
flashes of disturbing images. In her mind these were foreboding premonitions.
She saw clearly the trunk of an off duty police officer’s car, with guns and
punishing instruments inside. She felt strongly that her Second Life friend was
destined for a violent death. He would possibly beat her, shout at her, and
kill her.

Once Katrina
approached a Second Life acquaintance and pleaded with her to take her loved
one to the doctor. To the woman, Katrina was behaving irrationally, and her
hysterics almost made her unfriend her. The woman’s loved one was feeling
under the weather with flu, not seriously ill. However at the doctor after all,
they found cancer in her that was treated so that she could survive it.

Another time, while
helping a new friend learn basic Second Life skills, Katrina begged her SL
newbie to stay at home in Real Life after she had indicated that she needed to
log off suddenly. Katrina urged her new acquaintance to not take her
children shopping, even though her new acquaintance did not tell her that she
intended to do exactly that. Katrina kept the young mother online long enough,
appearing hysterically irrational again now to someone she barely knew.
Eventually as things got extended, the woman quit her Second Life viewer to put
her children into her car to drive out on their errand. The road to the
shopping plaza was blocked from the clean-up of a frightening scene where cars
had crashed disastrously only recently. The event shook up Katrina’s friend so
terribly that she went home and sat on her bed holding her babies tightly.
Without hearing back, Katrina stayed up all night feeling shock inside herself
that created a vision of her friend safe at home on the bed, with her children.

So as Katrina has
learned to cope with seeing images that seem to be mostly from panic-stricken,
or tragic moments, she desperately still tries to help people avoid the dangers
she envisions.

Katrina told Faye she
could see peril, harm, and depression in Faye’s life, and Faye told her she was
right. The feeling inside Katrina was growing so strong that it hurt herself.
Violence was coming to Faye. She could see very certainly that loud conflict,
brutality, and death would happen one night to Faye. It would come from the
hands of her husband, as he would use the objects and weapons in the trunk of
that car that she could so clearly see in her mind. She pleaded with Faye to
address her dangerous environment proactively, but Faye had to escape her
brainwashed condition and see things for herself before Katrina could help her.

Over a period of
weeks, Katrina mentored Faye via Second Life and Skype, reinforcing to her that
she was a beautiful and intelligent woman. Katrina reminded Faye that being the
submissive in a relationship did not mean greeting infatuation without
strength. Submissives do not need to be walked all over recklessly by a
Dominant. For Katrina, teaching was a way to reach out and get a connection to
Faye so that she could help her, and fortunately Faye gladly gravitated toward
Katrina’s care.

One night during a
group session via Skype, the reality of Faye’s situation began to outpour. The
violence. The depression. The forced sex with prostitutes that she had
convinced herself that she actually enjoyed. During that night when her
personal life cracked wide open to her Second Life group members directly in
the Skype conversation, a cloud impairing Faye’s judgement to defend herself
also began to lift at the same time. Faye began to cry as the group also began
to realize the tragic nature of what they were hearing. Fountains,
rivers, streams, oceans of tears began to flood Faye’s cheeks. Group members
online felt quite shocked by the thought of being so close to someone that was
being hurt so badly in ways they had only heard statistics previously. To
Katrina she felt relief that a sense of caring, from the progress of hours of
contact with Faye was finally beginning to produce a desperate rescue.

Katrina began to make
even more progress helping Faye understand that every bad situation can be
solved. There was an aunt several states away, and a plan to file a restraining
order against her husband just prior to escaping. But first Faye needed
to get her strength back, and like a true caregiver and nurturer Katrina
ordered Faye to drink, shower, put on makeup and repeat positive reinforcement
into the mirror every day until she was ready. Instructions at times were
so very basic; Start slowly. Put one sip and one bite of food into
yourself. Your body can’t handle a full meal immediately.

Faye stood up for
herself at work when finally faced with a certain dismissal, and she was able
to extend her employment enough. Her performance improved just slightly and she
felt better about that. She built up the the nerves to convince her husband to
let her visit her Aunt. Somehow he agreed to her travel, not suspecting his
wife to have any confidence or self awareness whatsoever to pull off a daring
escape. Perhaps he thought it would be even more time for him to break
from the situation, and to abuse more prostitutes directly. We don’t know.

But the night came for
Faye to board that Motor Coach and leave him forever. She thanked God she never
got pregnant to give birth to a son her husband had always wanted. When she
left and filed for divorce, it hurt his pride terribly. But she was several
states away and with the restraining order there wasn’t anything he could do.

Faye survived the
violence of an abusive relationship and her personal rebuild is still underway.
She will likely have emotional scars that will never disappear in her lifetime.
But she is alive, and has Katrina and her Second Life to thank in part.

It’s ironic too, to
think that she was so weak to submit herself to the abuse willingly and
repeatedly, but in fact she was after all strong enough to withstand it, and
then to eventually escape it. There’s safety and strength in numbers and
community to help us, but there’s also a strength inside all of us that we
should never forget can also save ourselves. Sometimes it takes someone special
to remind us, no matter how untraditional the contact might be.

If
you feel you are in an abusive relationship, or if you know someone who might
be, then you can help by reading the resources at www.safevoices.org to understand further
what you can do. Help and Hope are out there, and we are all stronger than we
can ever even know.